Titus (The Anno Ruinam Book 1)
Page 28
Titus looks on, pleased with his progress.
The end.
ABOUT THIS NOVEL
I started this story in 1999, during my final year of high school. Our English teacher said we could write whatever we wanted to for our last piece of assessment. One student wrote a musical, others did reports on their favourite cars/pastimes, some wrote reviews, I chose to do fiction.
The original story I submitted was a scene of the climax from the second novel (soon to be completed) with all and more of the techno-babble from this novel. I got an A+ which I was pretty happy about, and every year for the next 18 years I would revisit the story for a few months. Making small and sometimes big changes, the story grew uncontrollably and the format changed from comic books to movies, television scripts to finally, novels.
In the years following school, I worked a musician and film maker, and if I was lucky enough I could get a film screened at a festival or competition, or occasionally sell a piece of music to a local artist. While in between creative projects (and day jobs) I would write stories. This progressed to script writing, which led me to script Titus as a television mini-series.
My mother is an academic and creative practitioner, a poet, cultural theorist and published author. She spent a few months pushing me towards the direction of writing this as a novel, and as you can see, she pushed hard.
My father is an especially religious one; growing up he’d sit me down, flick through his Bible study notes and tell me with great enthusiasm his findings and discoveries. I became very familiar with Christianity and was given first hand exposure to a “believer”. I mean gung-ho, and all that comes with it.
This inspired me to tell a version of the biblical Rapture and tribulation (it’s pretty brutal and has never really been retold in popular culture) but initiated by the Devil instead of God as to circumvent the second coming of Jesus and sustain the existence of humans past that what God planned. Simple.
The destruction was easy to write about after seeing global events such as the twin towers falling, the Boxing Day tsunami, and the Fukushima meltdown.
The other particulars of the Rapture I decided to focus on took more work and a few technological breakthroughs (i.e. quantum computing) before I was happy with it. Dumachus is the Beast, Mother represents the Dragon, and the mark of the Beast is the Atom chip. "He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead." Revelation 13:16
In my senior year of high school I was living with a friend and his lovely family. His mother was a computer programmer and teacher, and a conspiracy theorist. Another believer, just on a different end of the scale. Again, I was exposed to the nature of fundamentalism and the associated dangers.
The idea of conspiracy theories plays an underlining part in the story for this reason, and I got to explore what would happen if this degree of conspiracies was actually true. Weather control, secret societies, ancient wisdom, Georgia Guidestones, supernatural and the occult, the making of a one world government… Moon landing I left alone. I hate that conspiracy. We went to the fucking moon, despite what any disillusioned Chemtrails-Flat-Earther-Antivaxers might think. So in this story I got to have some fun with how the rest of the world acts and reacts to the myths and realities of the Antarcticans.
Thanks to the internet I could research some random things, and found that the Pharaoh that was defied by Moses had sorcerers in his employment, and they have names. There’s actually about six different names on record so that gave me a pool to choose from. There’s the originators of my cult.
I also found the names of the two thieves that was crucified with Jesus in the Apocryphal Arabic Gospel of the Infancy of the Saviour. That got me thinking, if you shared your death with one of the most historically famous deities, shouldn’t there be more stories about these two? Right then my antagonist and protagonist was born.
The Church of Light used to go by the name of Threeve; everyone travelled in threes, there were Three wise men that created the technology, and some more references that I scrapped years ago. I changed the three wise men to women because halfway through this story I realised I had nearly no women in it! And these characters worked much better as women. Soon after I stumbled over Greek mythology and found the Moirai. Three women who make life, monitor it, and end it. I nearly fell off my chair when I realised that the three wise women did exactly that, and by changing just a single letter in their names, Nina, Decia and Marta came to life. I kept the name Moirai because it sounds cool. Also I was really hoping people would google parts of this story or check my history, mythology, geography and math, because I spent a long time trying to fit as much authenticity into this work (where I could). Even though I tried not to telegraph my research, I hoped that the truth would extend past the page and connect with the reader on a subconscious level.
At the time, and still to this day, I loved the idea of having telekinesis and reading minds, so I was going to make sure my heroes and villains possessed this power. However, after learning about laws of thermodynamics, rationalising these powers became harder to do. Being in danger of forcing an explanation down the reader’s throat, I did my best to avoid it and hope that people just accept it. Same with the hover technology. And their main power source. I had explanations for all of them back in the day, but as time went on their relevance diminished.
Originally the Antarcticans drilled a power generator to the core of the planet and powered their homes and factories that way, but 18 years later I could not suspend my disbelief that far and scrapped the idea. As people are familiar enough with the notion of renewable energy, Tesla batteries and natural resources as a primary power source, I could avoid detailing this in the story as it didn’t add anything to the narrative.
This story is a collection of all my favourite things mashed into one adventure. It has been really fun to write in the two-hour window I have to myself every night when both my partner and child are asleep. During the day I’m usually house bound with chores, cooking, doing stuff with the kid, or else I’m sleeping.
My partner and I had our first child as I was starting this book, and I have been the kid’s primary caregiver for a majority of the first few years. This gave me real insight in the fragility of newborns, the exhaustion of having a child, and the lengths I would go to defend her, or the lengths Elias would go to defend Seth.
Thank you for reading my story. It means the world to me to be able to speak to you through these pages, regardless of what year you pick this up. Even if I’m long dead, know that I am honoured to have this as a legacy, and you as my patron.
Caleb Byrnand
[*] King of the Jews
[*] 1 Parsa = 4 kilometres
[*] An enclosure used to block electromagnetic fields
[*] Latin for One day.
[*] A Roman salute attributed to Gladiators that were about to fight in the arena
[*] German for the psychological experience of something strangely familiar, uncanny
[*] Disaster relief